Today, Dropbox announced its Network Control capability; an enhancement that enables IT teams to selectively limit access to unauthorized, personal Dropbox accounts on corporate networks, while allowing access only to company-managed Dropbox Enterprise accounts. This is an exciting announcement for companies deploying Dropbox across their organization because it enables them to provide comprehensive visibility and control over enterprise Dropbox usage via Skyhigh’s API integration with Dropbox.

Greater Control over Collaboration Within Dropbox

The partnership between Skyhigh and Dropbox on Network Control provides IT teams with deep control over Dropbox usage in the company. With Dropbox’s new Network Control, customers can restrict access to all personal Dropbox accounts on the corporate network while enabling access to corporate Dropbox Enterprise for selected teams.. With access to Dropbox restricted to corporate usage of IT-sanctioned accounts, IT can use Skyhigh’s integration with Dropbox API to comprehensively monitor all activity and enforce granular policies to block the sharing of sensitive data with unauthorized recipients.

Let’s consider an example of a large healthcare company whose HR department would like to use Dropbox to collaborate with a third party recruiting agency. Using the Network Control capability, they can enable Dropbox Enterprise access, which is routed through their SSO solution, only for members of the HR team. To protect against exfiltration of corporate data, Skyhigh scans and detects documents containing personal health information (PHI) or any other classified data. IT can also build policies in Skyhigh to prevent unauthorized sharing with any recipients who aren’t employees of the company or the partner vendor.

A Timely Announcement

According to Skyhigh’s report, Dropbox is among the top 3 most used cloud-based file sharing services by enterprises. As a growing number of companies adopt Dropbox for business critical processes, the Network Control capability provides an additional layer of security that helps IT or Security teams govern the usage of cloud file sharing and collaboration services on the corporate network. Upon deploying Network Control, IT can now use Skyhigh’s API integration with Dropbox for complete visibility and control over employee usage, enabling them to address multiple security use cases.

Enforce compliance policies: A recent report from Skyhigh shows that 18.1% of all documents uploaded to cloud-based file sharing and collaboration services contain sensitive information including credit card numbers, social security numbers, health data as well as confidential company data such as financial records, business plans, and source code. Using Skyhigh, companies can enforce controls not only on documents uploaded as well as those leaving the Dropbox cloud. This way companies can ensure that they adhere with internal corporate policies as well as external regulatory requirements.

Enable secure collaboration: A recent report by Skyhigh shows that 9.3% of all files shared externally via cloud file sharing services contains sensitive data and 6.2% of all sharing requests are made to personal email accounts, such as gmail.com or hotmail.com. Using Skyhigh, companies can apply policies that prevent sharing of sensitive information outside the company domain. IT can also use Skyhigh to create domain whitelists and blacklists, so organizations can maintain control over which partners can receive certain information.

Detect and remediate threats: Cloud services like Dropbox have made large investments in building the necessary controls into their cloud infrastructure to protect customer data. But, within the shared-responsibility model, companies are still responsible for the behavior of their data and users. Skyhigh uses machine-learning based user behavior analytics and geo-location analytics to analyze cloud usage to detect threats from insiders, compromised accounts, and privileged users. This way, companies can proactively detect and remediate threats before they result in a security or compliance incident.

Skyhigh and Dropbox are used together by a number of enterprises to securely collaborate while meeting compliance, regulatory, and governance requirements. Skyhigh’s integration with Dropbox’s Network Control feature is a step forward in this partnership to deliver a secure, user-friendly cloud collaboration solution to some of the largest and most innovative enterprises in the world.